Tattered Green
by arctique48
Summary: The scars are everywhere and yet they are determined to forget. Meaningless in the wake of the War and still nothing's changed. One shot


**Disclaimer: **Hogwarts etc. belong to JKR.

_**AN**: A big hug for everyone affected by the London bombings today. A number of my friends had very stressful/traumatic mornings trying to get hold of parents in the city and my dad only just had a meeting up by King's Cross cancelled yesterday. So yeah. hugs and i hope everyone's alright.

* * *

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_"Peace will arise and tear us apart,  
And make us meaningless again."_

Space Dementia – Muse

* * *

She knows it's a terrible thing to think. To feel and to say. But all the same it's true. He knows it. They know it. Life just isn't the same anymore.

The war changed everything it touched. Not just changed, warped. She cannot go back to how it was. Not ever.

Change.

Revolution.

They call it development. Evolution the Wizarding World should have undertaken many years ago. But she can't accept it.

So many people want her now. Her services are in demand – she has everything she dreamed of as a twelve-year-old entering Hogwarts – the chance to make it big in her world where dreams come true. She made it happen one way or another, but nowadays she doesn't appreciate it quite as much as perhaps she should.

Job offers, interview requests, even fan mail. She tried at the beginning. Tried so hard to accept her new role ("The wizarding world needs someone like you, Miss Granger, they've all lost so much. You are the symbol of the cause… What was preserved in His defeat. They need you Miss Granger")

Children of the Revolution. That is what they call them. The papers, the public. They call them heroes and saviours. They act like they alone were the ones to make the world a better place. The Golden Trio: Hermione Granger, Ronald Weasley, Harry Potter. But it's not like that. She thinks about it sometimes and it makes her cry, because in all their celebrations and happiness they have forgotten the _real_ reason they won. They forget the people like Neville Longbottom and Severus Snape, Vincent Crabbe and Alicia Spinet. They were the real heroes she thinks and she cries,

She has an interview tomorrow. Witch Weekly. It's a personal favour to a friend; Lavender Brown is starting a new job. She's pleased for her; her old dorm mate's recovery brings a smile to her face. Lavender wants to make a good impression and what better way than to have Golden Girl Hermione Granger speak publicly for the first time in twelve months? Interviews were never her strong point. ("How does it feel Hermione? Tell us how it feels to be on the winning side." _The winning side? I feel lucky to be alive. It wasn't about winning – it was about staying alive. And we were only some of the few. How can they ask such a question? Like a game of quidditch not the War it really was. Did they not see the bodies? Hear the screams? It wasn't a matter of winning, it was survival. We didn't win, we escaped. _"It feels great.")

In the aftermath of the final battle she was left as spokesperson. Harry was comatose, Ron so unstable St Mungo's wouldn't let him out of his ward. She alone was able to talk to the world of what it was Harry had done in the wake of Dumbledore's sacrifice. She alone could stand on the steps of Hogwarts and claim the castle stronghold of Light once more. The night of Minerva McGonagall's funeral she had only a drunken Draco Malfoy for comfort and fell asleep beside her partially redeemed enemy, having downed enough alcohol to knock her out for a day.

Those few months she felt her world had broken. She avoided her parents to the point where they called on the Weasley twins to confirm she made it out of the Final Battle alive. She couldn't face looking her mother in the eye with the knowledge of the extent she had been willing to go to to save her family and her childhood friends. She visited Ginny Weasley's grave often enough to spill every tear she had. She cried a lot in those few months.

"_Live goes on, Granger." _

"_What if I don't think I want it to?" _

"_Get over yourself, Granger. We don't need any more bloody sacrificial Gryffindors." _

_A pause. "…Thank you, Malfoy."_

When Harry woke she had been in Draco Malfoy's flat. Alone while he saw his therapist.

It had taken the healers half a day to track her down and it was Mr Weasley in the end who hammered at the door in demand that she got to the hospital immediately. ("He's awake! Hermione, he's talking! He wants to see you. He asked where you were and we didn't know. He needs to see you, Hermione.")

"Where were you, Hermione?"

"I just went to get the paper… I didn't realise you were awake until Mr Weasley found me."

Confused. "I thought I heard someone say Malfoy…"

Casual. "Malfoy? No… Why? Is he here too?"

Apologetic. "No. Maybe I was just hearing things. Sorry, I'm not exactly with it at the moment."

Warm smile. "Don't apologise Harry. It's good to have you back."

"Thanks. I… It's good to be back." A soft, almost fragile pause, "He's really gone, isn't He?"

His eyes are wide and bright, like a child's (too much like a child). She stares back and answers. "Yeah, Harry. You did it. We won."

She smiles and feels so bad because it's not as true as it should be. Any of it.

"Where's Ron?"

"He's in hospital. He's recovering, but they wont let him see anyone. Not yet."

"Have you seen him?"

"Not since the end… Not since… Then."

"Oh." He nods, swallowing. "Do… do you know how he is?"

"He's alive."

"Oh. Good." Quiet. "How... How long have I been out?"

How long? It feels like forever though the battle seems only yesterday. An eternity in a second. "Three weeks."

She stayed with Harry all day until he fell asleep. (So small in the moonlight. A child, a child reborn into a better world, they said. Was it true?) She watched his body relax as natural sleep took him for the first time in a month. She had taken off his glasses and smoothed his sheets before grabbing a bag of fish and chips and heading back to Malfoy's.

She had taken to staying at his with her friends hospitalised, Nothing happened, she just turned up on his doorstep one night and asked if he had a sofa she could sleep on. He had. No questions asked, no answers given. They didn't talk often. Cooked and ate their separate meals, slept in separate rooms, lived their separate lives.

Perhaps it was just her reluctance to enter the real world. Unwilling to accept the new world she had helped to create. Perhaps she felt she needed to pay penance for her sins and what better way than living with Draco Malfoy? Either way, whether they liked it or not, they needed each other. Two lost souls in a world that refused to wait. It sounded so poetic, so idyllic and tragic when in truth they had no one left. Nowhere left to go. She couldn't go home anymore. To open the door of her townhouse and see the Prophet lying on her coffee table, open on a spread with the Dark Mark adorning an article on the dawning of the final battle, was just too much. Robes hanging from her chair, paper littering her desk and the remains of the breakfast she ate the day she helped save the world.

She knew she could not return to life as it was before. Indeed, she knew she shouldn't even want to. But with Voldemort gone and Harry no more than a national hero there just didn't seem to be a future. Nothing more to work for. Evil had been abolished and within a couple of months all Death Eaters were either captured or driven away. Maybe she had been forced to grow up so quickly she had reached her midlife crisis at the age of twenty-one, either way she found herself utterly lost for a reason to live.

"Granger, you look spaced out."

"Eh? Oh. Yeah. I'm fine. Just tired. Have a good day?"

He raises an eyebrow. Pleasantries were reserved only for funerals and drunken apologies. "Good. You?"

"Fine. Excellent. Productive. It was a good day. A Thursday. I like Thursdays. A lot. My birthday was on a Thursday once. Yours might have been too. Great isn't it? Thursdays. Yeah. Thursday."

He stares at her.

She looks back.

"More of a Wednesday person myself."

She caves.

"Harry." It's choked. He expected as much, a broken rasp as her painted grin begins to peel. "He woke up and I was here." A shuddering gasp and he watches, face neutral. "I wasn't with him, and it's so wrong. That's my place. By his side. That's where I'm meant to be. Where I'm expected to be. And I'm not." She shudders. "I'm not there and he could wake up all alone and I'm not even brave enough to think about it. And I'm 'sposed to be a Gryffindor but the saviour of the world – my _best friend_ just woke up from a three week coma with possible shell shock and mental imbalance and I'm sitting here – with _you _of all people – eating a bag of greasy chips and cod and hiding. I'm hiding because I'm scared that he might have changed. When he has every damn right to! And I'm so selfish and I hate it. But I can't stop! And I'm scared, Malfoy! I'm scared of what's going to happen because right now I feel as though the world has ended when it is all I've been working towards for the last nine years… I don't know what to do... so I'm eating soggy chips in front of a smashed TV with the guy I spent seven years hating and two trying to kill. And I'm using you and I don't really know what for and I don't even feel guilty for it. Because you're a bastard. And I'm just as bad. And we're fucking _horrible_ people. And it isn't fair. Because he woke up and I haven't visited Ron since he was taken in. And it's my fault and it won't go away on its own. And I don't know what to do. Malfoy, I truly do not know what to do..."

She cries into his couch and he watches in silence. She cries a lot these days. But he knows where she's coming from.

Slowly her breathing softens and her shoulders relax and eventually she sits up. "Would you like some fish, Malfoy? I think I'm going to head off now. I'll catch you later."

He sits back and watches her go, back straight and head proud as she closes his bathroom door behind her.

It only takes him a minute to vacate the room. He doesn't understand it but he's still so glad not to be alone.

* * *

"So, Hermione. Is there anyone special in your life at the moment?"

Big grin. False and bright and bold. She has to be happy for them – the public. She cannot let them think she isn't grateful. Because she is. She is and it isn't enough. "'Fraid not, Lavender. Just Harry and Ron and my work… There's still a lot left to be done and it wouldn't feel right…"

"Aww! You can't mean that! Not anyone?"

"Nope. Sorry." A big smile and girly giggle. Convincing.

"Well, I'm sure all that will change with time, Hermione. I must say, your hair is gorgeous! Didn't we tell you you should have grown it out?" A bright twitter.

"Thank you, but long hair wasn't exactly practical in my line of work back then."

Smiles falter. "True. Well." A swift pause – barely recognisable. "It's great to be hearing from you again, Hermione. Do you have anything else you'd like to tell everyone before we wrap it up?"

Her big mistake. The inevitable trip up. Not the past. Never. Remembering is bad. Remembering brings tears and fears and depressed middle-aged teenagers drowning in a tumbler of whiskey. '_Never forget'_ they told her. Now to remember is the crime, a social crime which brings disapproving twitters and shaking of heads. ("Don't Hermione… I just... I don't think I can handle it right now." Big green eyes. Pleading. "Just… It's too raw right now, you know? Just too soon.") It will forever be too soon. Too soon to think of the sacrifices and the apologies and the breaking, bleeding, shattered lives. Too soon.

"No, I don't think so, thanks Lavender."

"No. Thank _you, _Hermione Granger."

And now she watches as Lavender packs away her Quick-Quotes-Quill (hot pink in contrast to Rita Skeeter's venom green) and prepares to leave. It's strange sometimes, how talking about aspects of the past are taboo. She doesn't mean to bring it up but it's a part of her. And it seems sometimes that she alone can't (won't) just let go.

She knows Lavender suffered more than her, she knows because she was the one to find her alone and bleeding, sanity corrupt. But she got through it and is so much stronger. (Though not strong enough to speak His name. Years will pass and wounds will heal but his grip will never really leave them. You-Know-Who. He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. He rose again once and he could do it again. And this time they're not sure they trust Harry Potter to be the one to save them.)

She finishes her cappuccino in the small coffee shop and wanders onto Diagon Alley. She looks about and wonders at the sight. Children of the Revolution. Evolved. Developed. And yet foe glasses line restaurant walls and garlic hangs from windows. Runes are inscribed in flowerpots as if they have not yet left the Middle Ages and muggle witch hunters will spring from any corner to rip you apart with their guns and their bombs and that newfangled _technology_ which went from eccentric to evil in the space of week.

The scars are everywhere. Knockturn Alley is blackened from one purge or another. The Leaky Cauldron's bar is punctured with bullets and flecked with blood. The muggles should never have been told. She knows it and he knows it and perhaps to some extent they do too. Because for all their machines and strategy they could not distinguish between the good and the bad, and they could not defend themselves from their own weapons when the bullets came speeding back. A self-induced massacre and the guilt felt enough to bleed her dry.

Malfoy had been right. He had come storming into their Headquarters red faced and livid. And he had been right. Because when she told him it was _their _battle and they had every right to try and defend themselves he had came right up into her face and told them it was suicide. She had told him that was the prejudice talking but when she stood on the ruins of Gringotts steps and looked out across the broken remnants of the Royal Marines while the Obliviators did their work, she understood. And she hated herself for not seeing it sooner. Because how would they understand? How would they know that they could run and hide but never fight? How would they understand that for all their science and understanding of destruction they _could not win_? How could they see they were powerless?

And now she walks across the scarred cobbles of the magical street and watches a muggleborn with bright brown eyes gaze at the windows of Flourish and Blots. She sees the girl turn to her bemused parents while wizards avert their eyes and she sees a blond boy turn to his equally blonde mother and sneer in disgust and she _knows_ that for all their sacrifices nothing's changed. And it makes her sad. If she could she would go to that little girl and tell her exactly what to do in the face of that blond boy's taunts and leers. She would tell her how to make herself something more than the little muggleborn struggling to keep up. She would buy the girl a book and introduce her to Harry Potter so she would see you didn't need to be rich and pureblood to be respected and a hero in this world. And then she would tell her that the little blond boy wasn't entirely evil, or completely misguided. He was just a boy and in truth he understands the root of the prejudice about as much as her… but don't try to tell him that. Because he won't like to be proved wrong. Then she would hug her and tell her keep her friends close and then she would leave.

She doesn't though. Perhaps she is too far-gone for that. Instead she follows the others' lead and averts her eyes, walking into the pub and preparing to return to work.

* * *

They have peace now. Beautiful peace with hanging baskets suspended outside houses. (Above locked doors with wards and detectors.) Peace with children playing loudly in bright gardens. (Memorial gardens with names of martyrs inscribed in marble.) Peace with parents sipping tea and chatting about the future of their sons and daughters. (Only children but already pawns.) The peace leaves people glowing with satisfaction and pleasure.

But for some of them, for the heroes and the lambs once led to the altar, the peace brings something else. For some of them the world seems dark in the absence of something to fight and she finds it hard to find meaning in anything anymore. Her paperwork won't save lives, Harry's dawn raid will find nothing but intoxicated teens and Ron still wakes in the Burrow but finds it dead in the absence of a family.

For some post-War life is cold and while the Revolution rages with its acceptance and censored words they know that some things cannot be changed by law or victory. Voldemort was not the root of the problem and neither can everything be blamed on words. 'Mudblood' may be a thing of the past but notions of superiority have not been destroyed, and still little girls will enter Hogwarts and be picked on by little boys about their hair and their teeth and their blood. And only after fighting a War for its sake does she realise that in the eyes of men no two human beings can truly be equal.

It isn't that she thinks it was all to waste, that's not it at all. She know she saved lives and that was good, but she also knows she took them as well. She knows that there can never be a right and wrong, just different points of view, and sometimes the only difference is in who is the stronger. It saddens her. She has too much time to think these days. Harry no longer needs help saving the world and in this state of peace she finds an emptiness that breaks her heart.

And she thinks that's why she does it still. Sitting on a tattered green sofa in a flat just south of Kew Gardens. She comes every week almost, comes to sit and to talk and to bitch and reminisce, and he'll listen and argue and occasionally they'll fight and throw things like books and plates and cushions and it feels nice sometimes. Because you don't need to like someone to talk to them. And you don't need to trust them to understand what they mean.

And she knows it's wrong. And things are better off now. And Draco Malfoy is not the answer or anything close. But he hates the void as much as she and for now that is enough.

Just about.

They are meaningless with the absence of armies and wars and official prejudices, and all they ever wanted to do was make a difference. And now they have it seems so _empty._ And no one understands. Because the world is a better place.

And she's sorry. But she hates it.

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**AN: **Plot-less and entirely revolving around a single lyric. Hmm. Pointful. Yus, but do **review** because it makes me happy and making people happy is nice. 


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